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The dam truth: Climate change means more Lake Orovilles

Just two years ago, Lake Oroville was so dry that submerged archaeological artifacts were starting to resurface. That was in the middle of California’s epic drought — the worst in more than a millennium.

And then the rains came. This winter is on track to become Northern California’s soggiest on record. A key precipitation index is running more than a month ahead of the previous record pace, set in the winter of 1982–1983 (records go back to 1895). Lake Oroville is so full that it spilled over for the first time, spurring evacuations downstream.

California’s climate has always been extreme (even before humans got seriously involved), but what’s happening right now is just ridiculous. We are witnessing the effects of climate change play out, in real time.

California Department of Water Resources

Lake Oroville is as full as it has ever been, and remains vulnerable: We’re still in the peak of the rainy season, and more rain is on the way. On Tuesday and Wednesday, crews at the beleaguered dam worked around the clock to stabilize and reinforce the emergency spillway in anticipation of a fresh torrent of rainfall. But the scale of action — truck after truck of giant boulders dumping 1,200 tons of rock per hour — was small in comparison to the immense scale of erosion that has already taken place. There’s a real risk that the lake could spill over the top a second time.

And it’s not just Oroville. Major reservoirs ring the Central Valley, and nearly every one is full, or nearly so, as the Sacramento Bee reported earlier this week. Several levees statewide are seeping, and workers intentionally breached one along the Mokelumne River in Northern California over the weekend to relieve pressure. The levee system was simply not designed to be this stressed for extended periods of time.

Five successive waves of storms in the coming week could bring another foot of rainfall. The graphic below shows the amount of rain (and liquid-equivalent snow) on the way over the next seven days — enough to prompt renewed warnings from the National Weather Service.

NOAA/GFS model/Tropicaltidbits.com

Climate science and basic physics suggest we are already seeing a shift in the delicate rainfall patterns of the West Coast. A key to understanding how California’s rainy season is changing lies in understanding what meteorologists call “atmospheric rivers,” thin, intense ribbons of moisture that stream northeastward from the tropical Pacific Ocean and provide California with up to half of its annual rainfall. Exactly how atmospheric rivers will change depends on greenhouse gas emissions and science that’s still being worked out.

Atmospheric rivers are already responsible for roughly 80 percent of California’s flooding events — including the one at Lake Oroville — and there’s reason to believe they are changing in character. Since warmer air can hold more water vapor, atmospheric rivers in a warming climate are expected to become more intense, bringing perhaps a doubling or tripling in frequency of heavy downpours. What’s more, as temperatures increase, more moisture will fall as rain instead of snow, increasing the pressure on dams and waterways during the peak of the rainy season. There’s even new evidence that especially warm atmospheric rivers can erode away existing snowpack.

Peter Gleick, chief scientist of the Pacific Institute and frequent visitor to the Oroville area, is clear about what the drama at Oroville represents. “We’re seeing evidence of more extremes,” he says. “To ignore that would be a mistake.”

We’ve built dams based on old weather patterns, not for the extremes we’re now seeing. A clear problem emerges when we manage society for how things were, not how things are. In many ways, we are planning for the future with the expectation that the weather will be more or less the same as in the past. It won’t be.

The acting director of the California Department of Water Resources, Bill Croyle, made a telling statement earlier this week when asked why the infrastructure at Oroville seemed so fragile. “I’m not sure anything went wrong,” Croyle said. “This was a new, never-happened-before event.”

If we don’t start imagining and preparing for more “new, never-happened-before events,” more people will be put in danger — like they are right now in Oroville.

The near-disaster at Oroville has prompted another broad discussion about our country’s decrepit infrastructure, which arrives in the context of the Trump Administration’s plans to boost infrastructure spending.

But this is about more than just spending money to fix up our aging dams. The entirety of our country’s infrastructure needs to be reevaluated with the understanding that we have a unique opportunity to reimagine our shared future. If things are rapidly changing anyway, we might as well build a future consistent with our new weather reality.

At a place like Lake Oroville, that might mean leaving more space in the reservoir for flooding than has been done in the past. That wouldn’t be popular, because it would reduce the reservoir’s capacity, even as rising temperatures spur demand for more water. It may also mean increased resources for counseling services in coastal and riverine communities, as flooding events become more frequent and families consider whether to relocate. The state is already on a good start: Earlier this week, the California Department of Water Resources released a draft resolution for a comprehensive response to climate change, including dam operation.

After the current storms pass, California will still have two months left in its rainy season. It seems likely that 2016–2017 will become the wettest rainy season in state history. That means the danger at Lake Oroville won’t completely pass until this summer.

“They’re going to have to run the main spillway all spring in order to prevent additional flooding,” Gleick said. “I think people are going to be a little nervous for the next few months.”

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The dam truth: Climate change means more Lake Orovilles

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The Republican War on Obamacare Heads to the President’s Desk

Mother Jones

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Republicans in Congress have finally concluded their long-running, if likely futile, campaign to send a law gutting the landmark Affordable Care Act to President Barack Obama’s desk. The House passed a bill on Wednesday by a vote of 240 to 181 that would repeal much of Obama’s signature 2010 health care law. But it’s ultimately a symbolic measure: Obama pledged in December to veto the bill, which could strip health care coverage from millions of low-income Americans, and Republicans don’t have the two-thirds majority needed to override a veto.

This is the 62nd time that Congress has voted on repealing the law colloquially known as Obamacare, but it’s the first time the repeal bill has actually cleared both houses of Congress. Republicans finally got the bill through the Senate last December through a special filibuster-proof budget process that requires only 51 votes for passage instead of the usual 60, and the House approved the Senate’s bill on Wednesday. The bill would eliminate many of Obamacare’s key provisions, including the Medicaid expansion, tax credits to help low-income people afford insurance, and taxes to fund the program. It would also abolish the requirements that people get health care coverage and that large employers provide it.

Democratic lawmakers have lambasted the bill as a waste of time, but Republicans are eager to demonstrate their conservative credentials to constituents. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) touted the bill on Twitter as the beginning of a new era for conservatives in Congress.

The bill also includes measures to strip federal funding from Planned Parenthood, another conservative priority. The reproductive health organization has been under fire since an anti-abortion group released videos last year purporting to show officials from the organization discussing the sale of fetal tissue.

While the effort to gut Obamacare may be doomed to failure as long as Obama remains in the White House, the stakes are high. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that 17.6 million uninsured people have gained coverage through Obamacare. And despite their frequent attempts to repeal the program, Republicans have yet to agree on an alternative.

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The Republican War on Obamacare Heads to the President’s Desk

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The Arctic Just Set Another Frightening Record

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Ever year around the end of February, after a long winter, Arctic ice reaches its maximum extent. This year that happened around Feb. 25, when it encompassed 14.54 million square kilometers of ice around the North Pole.

Sound like a lot? It’s not. Really, really not. This year’s maximum extent was the lowest on record.

Ice extent (area covered at least 15 percent by ice) for 2015 (solid blue line) compared with 2012 (dashed) and the average from 1981–2010 (black line). Diagram by the NSIDC

The plot above shows the situation. The solid line shows the average ice extent over the year (measured from 1981–2010) and the gray area represents a statistical measure of random fluctuations; anything inside the gray is more or less indistinguishable from the average (in other words, an excursion up or down inside the gray area could just be due to random chance).

The dashed line was the extent in 2012, when unusual conditions created the lowest minimum extent in recorded history. The solid blue line is 2015 so far. As you can see, it’s already reached maximum, and it’s well below average. It’s also outside the gray zone, meaning it’s statistically significant. It’s the earliest the peak has been reached as well. Both these facts point accusingly at global warming—more warmth, and shorter winters.

We have to be careful here, because individual records can be misleading. The trend is what’s important. However, the trend is very, very clear: Ice extent at the North Pole is decreasing rapidly over time. Note that this record low extent is about 1 percent lower than the previous record…which was last year.

Here’s a NASA video describing this year’s low maximum:

The implications of losing Arctic ice are profound. First, high latitudes are more affected by warming; the temperature trends in the extreme north are twice what they are at lower latitudes.

Melting ice does contribute to sea level rise, though not as much as melting glaciers on land. The bad news: Those glaciers are melting faster than ever. This has a second effect that may prove just as disastrous, too. All that fresh water dumped into the salty ocean changes the way the water circulates around the world. This circulation is one of the key ways warmth gets redistributed around the planet. Disrupting this cannot possibly be good news for us. You can read more about this at RealClimate, and climatologist Michael Mann discussed it in a recent interview.

At the other pole, Antarctic land ice is melting at a fantastic rate, and the slight increase in sea ice is not even coming close to making up for it. Deniers love to point at the sea ice, but that comes and goes every year and is roughly stable; the land ice is melting away at huge rates. Claiming global warming is wrong because Antarctic sea ice is increasing is like pointing toward a healing paper cut on your finger when your femoral artery has been punctured.

Arctic ice is like the fabled canary in a coal mine; it’s showing us very clearly what we’re in for. And what’s headed our way is a warmer planet, an even more disrupted climate, and a world of hurt if we do nothing about it.

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The Arctic Just Set Another Frightening Record

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